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No more loss of sleep and worrying what might happen if a disaster occurs!

ASI backs up with Datto

With operations across some of Australia’s major capital cities including Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne, business technology solutions firm ASI Solutions is relied upon by its 2,000 customers – including 75 managed service customers – to ensure IT infrastructure resilience, lending to business continuity.

According to Daniel Johns, Head of Services, ASI Solutions, a key part of a business continuity plan is to have a reliable disaster recovery solution in place. This can help reduce the impact of outages, which are commonly caused by human error and ransomware attacks.

ASI solutions realised it was time for a change after it re-evaluated its then-existing solution based on three factors: value for money, ability to save time and risk mitigation levels.

The company opted to use Datto’s business continuity and disaster recovery solution as a complete on-premises disaster recovery solution.

“If any server on our network is compromised, we can shut it down in our production environment and start it up in the Datto environment in real-time – and users can continue to function,” Johns said.

“We can actually boot up virtual machines within the Datto appliance and conduct testing in an environment that’s completely isolated from the network, then shut it down once we’ve resolved.

“This means we can have our customers back up and running within 15 minutes of our service desk being notified that something’s wrong, which provides peace of mind that they won’t be compromised by loss of revenue, loss of productivity or loss of data.” Customers’ peace of mind, according to Johns, is “intangible, but quantifiable”.

In the event of a disaster, Johns says Datto’s solution really provides “bang for buck”. ASI Solutions is able to test its service every six months, run its entire environment from the cloud and gain access to emails and files at any time. “By providing key business stakeholders access to our test environment, we can show them we are in fact their virtual CIOs – which is an excellent way to visually demonstrate the extent of our service,” he said.

Since adopting the Datto solution, ASI Solutions has successfully transferred up to 25 customers to the new system, including insurance broker technology provider Steadfast Technologies.

Following a proof of concept, Michael Vardaoulis, Senior IT Infrastructure Engineer at Steadfast Technologies, said the benefits of the Datto solution were clear.

“Not only is the solution far superior to what we were using previously, it’s also a fraction of the cost. It has been a win-win-win decision,” he said.

One initial result Steadfast Technologies has been particularly happy with is the Datto solution’s ability to detect ransomware.

“We have experienced the value of this feature first-hand when backing up one of our laptops, which somehow got infected – but the ransomware hadn’t detonated,” Vardaoulis said.

“The regular backup occurred, and we were immediately alerted that the backup was infected. We were able to take swift action and isolate the device before anything further could occur.”

While Steadfast Technologies has not experienced any outages since the Datto solution was integrated, Vardaoulis recalled that the company’s previous disaster recovery solutions were “incredibly painful” to use.

“We report regularly to the board to provide updates on infrastructure and address questions around stability, uptime and risk management. The knowledge that the Datto solution automatically tests and verifies our backups daily has given our infrastructure team enormous peace of mind,” he said, “which in turn enables us to confidently report to our board that we have a functioning well-tested DR strategy, and that our infrastructure resilience is what they expect it to be.

“No more loss of sleep and worrying what might happen if a disaster occurs!”